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4/01/2013

Progressive crisis management

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

Rahm Emanuel

And when you don't have a "serious crisis" to get things done that you could not do before, you create one. Or at least the appearance of one.

This political philosophy, despite its obvious maliciousness, is not only effective, it is the primary modus operandi of the Progressive movement and always has been. Whether it is a "unprecedented corruption crisis' in the US Senate paving the way to the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment, a goal of Progressives to greatly diminish the control of the individual states over the federal government, or the adoption of Obamacare which invest tremendous power in the federal bureaucracy to stem the "healthcare crisis" in America, the progressives are masters at "crisis management".

Crisis, real or invented is the Progressives greatest tool.

I was reading a post over at Hot Air about how the Economist a publication which has traditionally taken the alarmist view when it comes to "climate change" has recently begun to scale back their apocalyptic pronouncement on the "climate crisis".

Hot Air points to one of the more illustrative segments of the Economist article where they note

If, however, temperatures are likely to rise by only 2°C in response to a doubling of carbon emissions (and if the likelihood of a 6°C increase is trivial), the calculation might change. Perhaps the world should seek to adjust to (rather than stop) the greenhouse-gas splurge. There is no point buying earthquake insurance if you do not live in an earthquake zone. In this case more adaptation rather than more mitigation might be the right policy a the margin. …

The climate science community and their Progressive institutional supporters are slowly but surely trying to downplay and backtrack from the crisis they themselves predicted. Granted they are not in full fledged retreat, that would greatly diminish their revenues and power structure, but they are attempting to bring their Casandra theories to be more in line with reality. The reality that is becoming obvious to all but their totally brain washed minions that they depend on for their narcissistic indulgences. In a sense the Progressives and their institutions are trying to put their own evil genie back into the bottle so as to maintain some modicum of credibility. Credibility which is essential to their continued power based on a public perception that they are unassailable experts rather than the corrupt ideologues they truly are.

None of this new found realism however, absolves them from their very real crimes against humanity. Because it was the same climate community and their allies, such as the Economist, which hyped the "serious crisis" in the first place. The resulting misdirection of resources, destructive policy objectives, and economic waste lies solely at their feet. As they ruthlessly destroyed any who might question their theories and pronouncements from on high, they used the public tills and trust to set the world down a misdiagnosed and destructive path. After all it takes ineptitude and a flagrant disregard for humanity to simultaneously demonize and marginalize the true (fossil) fuel to economic prosperity while burning the world's food supply as a replacement. Of course this is but one of countless stratagems that the Progressive elitist have led us towards in their corrupt ideological crusade.

We saw a similar example of this Progressive "crisis management" technique play out in a condensed version with similar though thankfully expedited results recently. Needing to maintain a death grip on U.S. fiscal policy, which to the Progressives means spiraling deficit spending, the Obama Administration attempted to portray the sequestration he originally proposed as a looming national crisis.

The similarities of cabinet officers being trotted out before the media and proclaiming the coming societal apocalypse due to reduced spending in their bloated departments were reminiscent to what we have witnessed over the past decades as various "scientific experts" spewed forth disaster scenarios about melting ice caps, increased droughts, and every other imaginable disaster due to global warming.

The difference is that the "sequester crisis" was easily dismissed by the general public due to its total disregard for common sense. Even the most ill informed among the public could see through the holes in the Administration's portrayal of impending doom . Whereas the "climate crisis" can seem to be and is intentionally presented to be, something that only "experts" can understand thus less likely to be questioned, the general public can intuitively sense that a minuscule cut in massive government spending could not possibly result in societal breakdown. Now too the public is becoming aware that you can not really have global warming without...well global warming.

Another example would be the new, but never ending Progressive's assault on the Second Amendment. There is no "crisis" as regards to guns in America. Yes there are occasionally tragic massacres perpetrated by mentally ill individuals who have been further egged on by the sick pop culture so lauded by the Progressives, but all in all there is far less gun violence in America today than there has been in decades.

By either measure, the number of gun murders is going down.

The 2011 and 2006 FBI crime reports show that firearm murders have declined each year since 2006. There were 10,177 such murders in 2006 and 8,583 in 2011 — a drop of 1,594 or nearly 16 percent in five years, even as the nation’s population continued to rise.

As for overall gun violence, the FBI tracks the use of firearms in three types of violent crimes (murder, robbery and aggravated assault), and the use of guns has declined in all three cases. From 2006 to 2011, robberies committed with guns declined 21 percent and aggravated assaults committed with guns declined 12.5 percent, according to the FBI reports. In both cases, the number of violent gun crimes dropped each year since 2008.

These numbers are continuing a downward trend which began in 1980 as gun violence in America has decreased

...the homicide rate since 1981 peaked in 1993 at 7 per 100,000. In addition, the Census Bureau’s annual National Crime Victimization Survey collects data on nonfatal firearm-related violent crimes, including those not reported to police. That data set shows a dramatic decline in gun violence since the early 1990s.

The Department of Justice, which commissions the Census Bureau’s victimization surveys, reports that there were more than 1 million firearm incidents and more than 1.2 million firearm victims in 1993 and again in 1994. But by 2009, the number of firearm incidents (326,090) and firearm victims (352,810) dropped by more than two-thirds.

Yet to listen to the Progressive politicians and their allies in the media, academia and Hollywood you would believe that modern America had returned to Wyatt Earp's Tombstone. When in fact other than in Progressive run enclaves like Rahm Emanuel's Chicago or Bloomberg's New York, gun violence in America has fallen dramatically.

So where is the crisis? The crisis is manufactured by Progressive politicians whose goal is what it has always been, to decrease the individual liberties of citizens in order to increase the power of the state, meaning themselves.

As long as there are new generations to be fooled by cheap emotional appeals rather than a critical thought process able to see through "today's crisis", the progressives will continue to destroy our cherished freedoms along with a chance for growing prosperity. The progressive agenda since it is destructive of freedom can only have one outcome, tyranny then revolution, it is simply the natural outcome to all systems that do not actively embrace a freedom agenda.

So the true crisis the Progressives face is not how to gain more control but how to keep what they have acquired. Management is a tricky thing, in the long run it requires the consent of the managed to be successful. Once the crisis is shown to be a political tool to manipulate public opinion, see the recent sequester battle, deep skepticism on the part of the public begins to seep in and the ability to "shape" public opinion becomes far more difficult and eventually is lost.

This is where I believe, I hope , America is. The constant crisis hype that the progressives need to "get done" things they could not otherwise do, is beginning to wear the body politic raw. Deep skepticism is rearing its ugly head and as the total lack of true management skills manifests itself as the would be "experts" attempt to put into actual practice those things which were truly only designed to gain political control, there will be more and more true crisis which the Progressives are truly not capable of managing. See stimulus, Obamacare, green energy, etc,etc, etc,

What does this mean? Its going to get worse before it gets better, but it will get better, because the Progressive agenda will once again fail, as it has in the past and always will. The only question is, how much power will they amass before they collapse? Again.